London Biotech's AI Cracks Cancer Drug Combos With $2.8M

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-18

### From Stealth to Spotlight: Big Picture Bio's $2.8M Bet on AI-Designed Cancer Combos Big Picture Bio, a London-based biotech startup, just stepped out of stealth with $2.8 million in combined funding. That's about £2.2 million, or €2.55 million. The company is using AI to design combination therapies for cancer and other tough diseases. And they're not just playing around in a lab—they're building a "world model" that simulates how tumors, immune cells, and surrounding tissue interact. The goal? Figure out which drug combos, and in what order, are most likely to outsmart cancer resistance. The funding breaks down into two parts: a $1.9 million pre-Seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, plus $890,000 in non-dilutive support from Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships Programme. Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White also chipped in. ### The Brains Behind the Operation Big Picture Bio was founded by CEO Dr. Kerstin Papenfuss and CTO Dr. Mark Hammond. Both spent years at Deep Science Ventures (DSV) before spinning out. Papenfuss built and led DSV's therapeutics team, founding 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies. She also held roles at LifeArc and the Cell & Gene Therapy Catapult. Hammond co-founded DSV and took it from $190k to a portfolio worth over $1.27 billion. He led its engineering work on agentic scientific discovery and was previously involved in licensing and investment at Imperial College. During his tenure, Imperial's spin-outs included Hinge Health, Hark, and Monolith. The pair have worked together for seven years, tackling complex, evolving diseases across the DSV portfolio. ### Why AI Beats the Lab (Sometimes) Here's the thing: a full pairwise screen of just 100 drugs at 100 doses would require roughly 50 million lab experiments. That's a scale no physical screen can reach. But Big Picture Bio's models can search computationally in seconds. > "Cancer is not one disease driven by one target, but we still develop drugs as if it were. Combinations are how we beat it – and with more than 900 billion of them possible, no lab on earth can test its way to the right ones," said Dr. Papenfuss. She added, "That is the problem we built Big Picture Bio to solve: model the disease as the dynamic system it actually is, then design against it – combinations chosen because they are most likely to work in patients, not because they were the ones we could get to. This funding takes our first designed combinations out of the model and into the lab." ### Already Proving It Works The company says its predictive approach has already been tested against real clinical data. They correctly forecasted the failure of Regeneron's fianlimab trial. And they posted 14 predictions ahead of the 2026 ASCO oncology conference—12 of which proved accurate. Remy Kesrouani, Managing Partner at Kadmos Capital, said, "I had the privilege of working closely with Kerstin and Mark at the very beginning of Deep Science Ventures, and saw first-hand the determination, conviction and sheer resolve they bring to building ambitious, scalable businesses. Big Picture Bio is the culmination of that journey, applying a genuinely differentiated approach to AI to one of drug development's hardest problems: predicting how complex clinical trials will actually behave." ### What's Next for Big Picture Bio? The funding will take Big Picture Bio's AI-designed cancer combination therapies from computer models into the wet lab. They'll initially focus on cancer and immune-mediated diseases but aim to move beyond trial-and-error combination testing altogether. Their advisory team includes heavy hitters from AstraZeneca, Exscientia, and PhoreMost. So they're not short on expertise. If Big Picture Bio can pull this off, it could change how we approach cancer treatment. Instead of testing endless combinations in labs, we could design them in silico—faster, cheaper, and smarter. And that's a big picture worth watching.